All organisations depend on the quality and availability of their information.  From customer records to production data, information is created, captured, accessed and used by any organisation through both human activity and information technology.  Every organisation to some degree categorises or classifies their information into meaningful groups to help them retrieve it later.  The level of sophistication involved depends on the scale and complexity of the situation, but everyone does it.  'Knowing what we know' has a value to any business.

The classification of information may be informal (e.g. in an individual's memory) or highly formalised (e.g. in a file or database record).  All  information has some value to a stakeholder within the organisation but not all information has equal value.  It is therefore good practice within organisation to recognise the relative value of the different information items and adopt appropriate and cost effective ways to manage them.  Critical to this management process is the way that the information is classified.

As a precursor to adopting any information classification scheme it is vital to begin with a few basic design considerations:

• What value does the information have?  Is this to an individual, group or process within the organisation?
  'Do not expend effort and cost to classify and keep information that does not have an owner and value.'
• What businesses processes depend on the information?  Would they fail if the information was not available, was difficult to access or of poor quality?
  'Identify what matters and focus you efforts in those areas.'
• Who are the main information users?  Is it potentially all staff, a small group or a set of information specialists?  What skills do they have to understand the classification approach and the retrieval method?
  'If you have never been in a library and did not know how they work, how long would it take to find a book?'
• What is the business purpose of the classification scheme.  Is it structured or unstructured storage, speed of retrieval, ease of collaboration or what else?
  'Database table descriptions and relationships classify structured data well and can produce results quickly from large data volumes, but the approach does not work so well for documents.  There may be established, subject classification schemes already available (e.g. MESH for the medical and pharmaceutical sectors).'
• Who will do the classifying?  All staff, specialist staff or automated classification?
  'This will always be a balance of time, cost and effort both initially and as an ongoing process.  It may be as simple as the individual adding properties to a Word file to classify it into a category (e.g. sales) or as complex as designing a database schema or an organisational taxonomy.'

The type of classification  approach required will depend on the answers to these and a number or other questions.  i-logue has worked on numerous information classification projects from simple procedural based solutions to expansive specialist taxonomies.  If you are struggling to retrieve your information than we can probably help.